Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Merced, CA, 95343, USA.
Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2024 Feb;160:106671. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106671. Epub 2023 Nov 11.
Human life history schedules vary, partly, because of adaptive, plastic responses to early-life conditions. Little is known about how prenatal conditions relate to puberty timing. We hypothesized that fetal exposure to adversity may induce an adaptive response in offspring maturational tempo. In a longitudinal study of 253 mother-child dyads followed for 15 years, we investigated if fetal exposure to maternal psychological distress related to children's adrenarche and gonadarche schedules, assessed by maternal and child report and by dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA-S), testosterone, and estradiol levels. We found fetal exposure to elevated maternal prenatal psychological distress predicted earlier adrenarche and higher DHEA-S levels in girls, especially first-born girls, and that associations remained after covarying indices of postnatal adversity. No associations were observed for boys or for gonadarche in girls. Adrenarche orchestrates the social-behavioral transition from juvenility to adulthood; therefore, significant findings for adrenarche, but not gonadarche, suggest that prenatal maternal distress instigates an adaptive strategy in which daughters have earlier social-behavioral maturation. The stronger effect in first-borns suggests that, in adverse conditions, it is in the mother's adaptive interest for her daughter to hasten social maturation, but not necessarily sexual maturation, because it would prolong the duration of the daughter allomothering younger siblings. We postulate a novel evolutionary framework that human mothers may calibrate the timing of first-born daughters' maturation in a way that optimizes their own reproductive success.
人类的生命史时间表存在差异，部分原因是对早期生活条件的适应性、可塑性反应。关于产前条件与青春期时间的关系知之甚少。我们假设，胎儿暴露于逆境可能会诱导后代成熟节奏的适应性反应。在一项对 253 对母婴进行了 15 年跟踪的纵向研究中，我们调查了母亲在怀孕期间心理困扰的胎儿暴露是否与儿童的肾上腺功能初现和性腺功能初现时间有关，这些通过母亲和孩子的报告以及脱氢表雄酮硫酸盐（DHEA-S）、睾酮和雌二醇水平来评估。我们发现，母亲在怀孕期间心理困扰程度升高与女孩（尤其是长女）的肾上腺功能初现提前和 DHEA-S 水平升高有关，而且在考虑了产后逆境的指标后，这些关联仍然存在。男孩或女孩的性腺功能初现没有关联。肾上腺功能初现协调了从青少年到成年的社会行为转变；因此，对于肾上腺功能初现的显著发现，而不是性腺功能初现，表明母亲在怀孕期间的压力引发了一种适应性策略，即女儿的社会行为成熟更早。长女的影响更强表明，在不利条件下，母亲的利益是让女儿加速社会成熟，而不是性成熟，因为这会延长女儿照顾年幼兄弟姐妹的时间。我们提出了一个新的进化框架，即人类母亲可能会以一种优化自身生殖成功的方式来校准长女的成熟时间。
